Former Fox TV host Tucker Carlson spoke in Alabama on Thursday night and got right to the part about being fired.
After a long, standing ovation by a sold-out crowd of 1,189 who paid between $50 to $125 to hear him speak for more than an hour at the Oxford Performing Arts Center for the annual fundraiser for Rainbow Omega, Carlson immediately broached the subject with his first line.
“I’m probably the first unemployed person you ever invited to speak,” he joked. “It’s funny. I never give speeches because I’m working. When I accepted this speech six months ago or something, I didn’t realize how much free time I would have. One never knows, does one?”
Carlson, after previous stints at CNN, PBS and MSNBC, worked for Fox News from 2009 until he was fired on April 24. The final episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News aired April 21. For much of the time since it launched in 2016, it had been the highest rated program on cable news.
Carlson gave a long, genial monologue that only tangentially touched on politics and focused more on dogs, family and highlighting the work of people who help people.
Rainbow Omega, a residential facility in Eastaboga that houses up to 88 adults with developmental disabilities, booked Carlson through a speaker’s bureau for the event to raise money.
“I accepted for two reasons, one shallow and one a little deeper,” Carlson said. “One is, I do love Alabama. I’m not just saying that. We (wife, Susan, and four kids) spend a lot of time in rural Maine, which is so close to this culturally, you have no idea. In a great way. The food is not very good in rural Maine. The food here is unbelievable. I’ve spent a lot of time in this state, and part of the reason is you have great hunting and fishing. The real reason is it has everything that I like. It has really nice people. It has amazing food. I have the world’s worst eating habits and here that’s not judged. Fried Oreos? Okay! I love that. I love the lack of judgment.”
Carlson visited the Rainbow Omega campus in Eastaboga on Thursday and spent some time admiring the scenery, he said.
“And I think it’s physically beautiful, the state of Alabama is just beautiful,” Carlson said. “From the coast, to North Alabama, the whole thing. It’s funny. I was thinking this morning, I’ve lived in the Northeast most of my life, and Alabama’s one of those places that people in New York, for example, used to kind of sneer and go, ‘Alabama.’ I thought this morning I haven’t heard that in a long time. I haven’t been to New York in awhile, I admit. I’m never going again. It’s one of those things.”
Carlson said the nation’s view of Alabama has shifted dramatically.
“The perceptions, national perceptions kind of shift very slowly, then you wake up in the morning and everything’s different,” he said. “The rest of the country’s view of Alabama is one of those things that just changed completely. Nobody makes fun of Alabama, at all, because they realize actually that’s how you’re supposed to be living. The only way to know what people think about something is to not listen to what they say, I say this as someone who has talked for a living for a long time, ignore the words. Watch what they do. Watch how they live. That’s the only accurate measure of what people really think. Ignore that. Be like your dog, who understands not a single word of what you’re saying but knows exactly who you are.”
It’s a state that’s attracting people from other states, he said.
“Are people moving to Alabama? Oh, yeah,” Carlson said. “I love that. Why are they moving here? They’re moving here because Alabama’s everything that you would want in a place that you live. It has cohesive communities, super-nice people, gentle people, people who care about their neighbors, and it has an abundance of nature, something that we I think undervalue. We went through this weird, kind of mass hypnosis where everyone was convinced we had to move to some horrifying concrete city in order to make a living and forgot that actually you need to see green, or else you’ll go insane. If you’re alienated from God’s creation, you become fundamentally alienated. Nature is the most beautiful thing. Driving around here today, I thought to myself, you think of Alabama, if you don’t live in Alabama, as a place that has a lot of past attached to it. And I thought today, especially reading the numbers about what’s happening in your state, Alabama is not the past, Alabama’s the future.”
See also: Tucker for president? Someone yells ‘Run for president’ at Tucker Carlson
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